Happy Born Day, Toni Morrison: The Woman Who Taught Us to Fly

Reflections on Legacy, Liberation, and Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison gave us more than stories—she gave us wings. She knew that Blackness was boundless, that love could be both a shackle and a key, that history was something we carried in our bones and our names. Today, on her birthday, I return to Song of Solomon, the novel that taught me about freedom, about longing, about the way we search for ourselves in the echoes of those who came before us.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

A simple line, yet it reads like scripture. How often do we hold onto the weight—ancestral burdens, misplaced love, the ache of not being seen? Morrison urged us to unlearn, to release, to trust that we were meant to soar. Milkman’s journey was ours, too—a lesson in knowing that liberation isn’t just about where you land, but how you take off.

Morrison’s gift was her knowing. She wrote for us, about us, with an intimacy that felt ancestral. She honored the everyday, the mystical, the mundane—because all of it was worthy of preservation. Her words were a home, a mirror, a map.

So today, I sit with her language like a prayer, letting it remind me that we are, as we have always been, capable of flight.

Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison 💙. You are missed.